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Representative Giffords’ Attacker: A Criminal or a Terrorist?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

According to evidence presented by law enforcement officials in court, Jared Lee Loughner planned the assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) well in advance. While little about his motives has been revealed so far, there cannot be any doubt that the attack was politically motivated. He left a trail of anti-government rants, often complaining about the Federal Reserve and the fact that the currency is not backed by gold and silver.

Right-extremists, among them militia groups, are among those who insist that a gold or silver standard would be the only way to assure a stable currency. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume that the Tucson shooter shared other causes and grievances of the right-extremist milieu—predominantly directed against the “unpatriotic” liberal and moderate enemies that do share their extreme ideas. For that, he did not have to attend actual meetings of so-called patriot or militia groups or even know any of those movements’ activists.

Today, the Internet is most instrumental of spreading extremists’ propaganda and winning over followers to extremist causes.

That is precisely the reason why FBI director Robert Mueller told reporters yesterday,

“The ubiquitous nature of the Internet means that not only threats but also hate speech and other inciteful speech is much more readily available to individuals than quite clearly it was 8 or 10 or 15 years ago.”

In the hours and days after the massacre, the perpetrator has received many labels by public officials and by reporters and media commentators, among them madman, crazy, disturbed, alienated, deranged, unbalanced, and the likes.

Was the attack, then, the insane act of a mad young man?

As far as I am concerned, the premeditated attack that killed six persons and wounding a dozen others was an act of terrorism by definition. Terrorism means after all the deliberate, politically motivated targeting of civilians or non-combatants.

It is interesting, though, that neither the statements by officials nor by news personnel and analysts have called the incident an act of terrorism and/or the shooter Jared Lee Loughner a terrorists.

On the “Morning Joe” show this morning I heard somebody note that there was nothing political about the incident.

Of course it was.

Strange, that the chattering class has far less of a problem calling similar acts of violence inside the United States “terrorism,” when the perpetrators are identified as Muslim Americans.

Take the Fort Hoods shooting more than a year ago, when U.S. Army major Nidal Hasan killed 13 persons and wounded more than two dozens. Or think of the would-be Times Square bomber Faizal Shahzad, a naturalized citizen, who hoped to kill as many people as possible.

Whatever their mental state might have been, these men, just like the Tucson shooter, had political grievances that were nourished by postings on Internet sites and eventually led to planned violence.

Whereas Hasan and Shahzad got virtual and, in the case of Shahzad eventually personal encouragement and support from preachers of hate abroad, Loughner came to act in a domestic atmosphere of political polarization and hate speech.

To be sure, political attacks come from the right and the left.

But starting with the election of President Obama, the emergence of the Birther movement, the revitalization of the extremist patriot and militia movement, the threatening nature of the Tea Party advent during 2009 town hall meetings at the heights of the health care reform debate, and peaking again during last year’s bitter election campaign, right-wingers have been particularly extreme in the rhetoric of hate and division.

Although one would hope that Sarah Palin did not want to encourage real life attacks on the targets she pinpointed during the campaign, the fact is that she publicized a graphic that displayed gunsight-style crosshair targets on the districts of 20 Democrat politicians that supported Barack Obama’s healthcare reform, among them Representative Giffords. The idea was to “take out” those opposition candidates—in the next election. But placing the “hit list” side by side with Palin’s gun-blazing "Don't retreat, reload” phrase, this stuff could be understood quite differently.

What happened in Tucson the other day should be a wake-up call for extremists of all colors and, more important, for the majority that tends to remain at the sidelines of political discourse.

It does not bode well that right-wingers have already began to push back against critics of their demagoguery and hate speech—and, of course, on their ridiculous interpretation of the right to bear arms based on the second amendment.